Borga Dorter | Thermopylae / 2005

on the edge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Borga Dorter (screenwriter and director) Thermopylae / 2005 [11 minutes]

 

Mr. Radford (Jon Powell) is a professor of philosophy in the prestigious boy’s high school in the Los Angeles suburb of Rancho Palos Verdes in the 1950s. Although all his students are born from well-to-do families and are impeccably dressed, most of his students could care less about the Greek classics, to which their recent test scores attest.

   The exception is an overeager young man, Andrew Beckman (Andreas Wigard) who receives an A for his paper, and the special attention of Radford. But it is also apparent that Andrew is more than a little solicitous of attention, stopping by the professor’s office after class to thank him for his grade, and staying on a little longer than his comments and questions seem to require. A record player seems to draw his attention and as he and Radford both rise to attend to it, their hands meet and we imagine what quickly happens after a sudden kiss.

     This is the decade in which a great many closeted gay men out of necessity married and even believed themselves to be living happy lives. Yet it is apparent that Radford’s life, with long hours spent in his office, is not filled with spiritual and physical content, most obviously by his sudden lack of judgment. He has just had sex with a young male student and the consequences, if discovered, were even more significant than they are even today with our new puritanical hysteria about all things to do with children under a magically-declared age of consent. Not only would he have lost his job, his wife, and his reputation, but he would have been shunned by all who had previously known him. What would the alternative have been? What job might he be able to obtain with such an offense on his record, not to ignore the fact that he might surely have been arrested and imprisoned.

      Radford, accordingly, spends a sleepless night. And when the next morning Andrews does not even show up to his class he has difficultly even rationally conducting a student discussion, announcing a surprise quiz instead.

      After class he notices Andrew and his father sitting outside the Principal’s office. What else can he imagine. His life is over. And he drives off along the Pacific coast, stopping along a cliff view where we observe him at the beginning of the film, clinging to the guardrail. We can only wonder whether he’s debating a jump or after a long and profound review of the moral principles of Aristotle and others, he will regain his equilibrium and return for his justified punishment.

      What he cannot know is that the meeting has nothing at all to do with him, but with the boy’s failing grades in his other classes. Obviously, he has devoted all his energies to the philosophy class while paying no attention to his other professors and their lessons. Evidently, this is simply a warning, and after the meeting Andrew goes to Radford’s office, knocking on the door but finding it locked. When will his professor return?

      The audience can only ask: will he return? And, if he returns what will he do about Andrew and his feelings for him or any attractive young boy who might enter his classroom in the future?

      Dorter’s film gets much of the feeling of the early-to-mid 1950s right, and Radford nicely acts the role very much in the style of some of the anxiety-ridden male figures of films by Douglas Sirk and others such as Nunnally Johnson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956). However, whoever designed the credits seems to have confused the early turn-of-the-century flourishes with 1950s film design which actually were far sleeker and more adventuresome than what we often see today. One need only think of Saul Bass’ credits for Hitchcock’s Vertigo and North by Northwest.

     As provocative as this short film is, it seems to me to call for a fuller feature treatment.

 

Los Angeles, August 20, 2022

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (August 2022).